We’re all aware that search engine’s and their related services, such as those offered by Yahoo! and Google, basically come to the consumer for kind-of-free. I say the kind-of- part because you’re actually exchanging two things for those free services.
User Data
Visiting advertisers
It’s basically the same model that free-to-air television works from. You have advertisers pay for the bulk, if not all, of your costs and then sell whatever statistical data you have on top of it to other marketing companies, or directly to advertisers themselves in the form of more expensive advertising due to greater degrees of targeting.
Which makes Yahoo’s latest offering somewhat odd: http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/opt_out/targeting/
The Yahoo Ad Interest Manager allows users to basically select which type of advertising they’re interested in, which is a good thing as it means they receive more relevant ads of a more relevant nature, which technically should mean better CTRs and conversion rates. But the bad part is that they let some users opt out entirely.
Now, Yahoo users have been proven time and again to be less savvy than users of other search engines. The reasons for that are unimportant. But this does technically shrink the pool a bit of users who are going to see you ads if you’re doing PPC campaigns on Yahoo and its partners’ platforms.
Now, I could be jumping the gun a bit here, but I think this is most likely going to be a good thing.
Given that the users of Yahoo are universally less savvy, it means that you’re getting a kind of reverse Darwinism going on, where the ones smart enough to not have purchased anything shown to them on the advertising platform anyway are basically going to opt out. This should lead to a higher CTR, which means a lower CPC. This leaves behind the more easily influenced and naive people who were entirely unaware that opting out was even an option or, better yet, those that actually want to see advertisements within specific categories!
If you’re advertising by PPC, but not currently using Yahoo, I’d recommend giving it a look into in a few weeks when more people have started to use this feature set.
eBay clearly has never heard of the Emancipation Proclamation
Those of you out there in PPC land probably already know about dynamic insertion. It’s a great feature that let’s you select a category of words, and then basically show up in the sponsored SERP for all of them if Joe Q Public types in the query. Of course, it also costs you a heck of a lot more to actually run with it turned on and can quickly bankrupt you if you’re running PPC full tilt, and don’t know how to use it all that well.
Now I’ll be dead set honest. I don’t use it myself, and I’m not really sure of all the technical stuff behind it. You’ll have to go and do a bit of research on it for yourselves in order to implement it well. There’s a decent enough explanation over at RedFly, which probably explains why they’re at SERP #1 for the keyphrase.
What I am good at is thinking of uses for things that a lot of people seem to overlook and neglect a lot of the time, and in this particular instance, it’s having that keyword dynamically load content for you. Again, I’m not going to give you guys code. I’m not that great at it, I normally get someone else to do it for me (outsource your weak points, folks, because pride gets you nothing), and you can probably find someone that’ll do it better. You’ll probably need to rewrite your .htaccess file to allow for dynamic URL generation as well.
However you choose do it, the fact of the matter is that you can get the keyword from your PPC campaign to load into you site in contextually relevant places: “Do you like {keyword}’s music? Listen to it free at www.yoursite.com/{keyword}”
Oddly enough, it's an actual dashboard widget if you're running a Mac
However, when people click through and only see a whole bunch of linked text, their spamometer tends to raise a few points. Which is why you’ll need to dynamically load some pictures as well.
The easiest way to do this is to actually have a repository of album or movie cover images. Although this will take up a rather large amount of space on your server, and who knows how often any of it will be needed. Theoretically speaking, you could load images dynamically getting the first SERP in an image search engine such as images.google.com or images.search.yahoo.com. I imagine you’d have to figure out some way of linking this all up with the API of the search engine. If you don’t know how to do it, get a developer to do it for you.
In this manner, you’ll be able actually load up not just relevant text, but also relevant imagery. Do it to a template, perhaps using an internal search function on your own site, and you can dynamically load relevant content to almost anything people are looking for… and if they think they are able to get almost any content they’re looking for, then they’re much more likely to convert into a sale for you.
Why would you run something like this? Well, being topical for a start. If another celebrity goes and dies on you, you’ll want a site that can dynamically load pictures of them and the albums they made or movies they starred in.
The only downside is that you are relying on the algorithm of an image search engine, meaning you could get some fantastically wrong image-to-article match ups happening.
About two weeks ago, Yahoo! decided to finally shut down Geocities.
In case you don’t know what Geocities was, because you’re under 15 years old or were living under a rock since 1994, it was basically the precursor to MySpace. Free websites for everyone with a very basic GUI that allowed you to build a website that was amazingly painful to look at, generally filled with spelling errors, and often related to some kind of scam or racist material… util they cleaned it up in the early 00s at any rate.
Geocities burns to the ground
The point is that it was freakin’ huge. Comparatively speaking, it would have had a similar per capita user base that MySpace currently enjoys. There were tens of thousands of sites of sites built that link to some page on Geocities pages of “relevant” information. Those links are now orphaned and have nowhere to point to.
Which is a goldmine for you to pick up on, as pointed out by the good folk at IAMSEO
They recommend using the following search string in Google to find sites that are relevant to you:
site:geocities.com inurl: your-keyword
One you’ve found the actual sites that were linked to that had relevance to your keyword, use Yahoo!s own Site Explorer to tell you where those links were coming from in the first place.
After that, it’s a matter of contacting the site owners and asking them if they’re aware that Geocities is gone, and would they perhaps like to link to your site now.
It’s certainly an arduous and long process if you don’t have a way to automate it, such as scripting, but it will be quite rewarding, as many of those links will be as old as the Geocities sites themselves, meaning the site they come from has some good link juice to be squeezed.
And if that doesn’t work, there’s always dropping links in their comments and/or guestbooks
If you keep up with news from Searchenginia (it’s my made up name for the land of search engines… although who am I kidding? Really it’s part of the San Fernando Valley) you’ve probably heard that Microsoft is taking over Yahoo’s search function by basically dumping a Yahoo skin on top of Bing, much in the way that Google now runs Baidu.
The point is that the Yahoo algorithm sucks, they’re finally acknowledging this, and letting people with some idea run the show. No, really, Bing is actually a quality search engine for anything that involves you handing over cash. Not so much for general information & research though.
The point is that if you’re trying to rank your site high via SEO tactics, a) you no longer have to bother about trying to go for Yahoo traffic,b) you will have to worry about going for Microsoft traffic, and c) the categorically dumbest customers have now been rolled into one for you.
This is good news!
As of July this year, Google had 67.5% of the global market. Yahoo came in second place at 7.8%, and MS’s various search names held a paltry 2.9%. The combination means you’re effectively getting a slice of 10.7% of the global search market. Now, I’m well aware that 10.7 is not even a sixth of 67.5… but you’re dealing with less intelligent people that are more inclined to buy things! Don’t forget, these are the people that use Yahoo!Answers that we’re going for
So start trying to rank #1 in Bing. It’ll grow into importance over time, and your site will have been optimized for it long before the others, giving you the first mover advantage.
If you’ve been using the amazingly popular social network Facebook to promote your Affiliation Cash programs, a rethink of strategy may be in order, particularly if you’re targetting those over the age of 50.
Click for full size
Whilst we’re all aware that Facebook’s booming growth rate simply canont be sustainable (even the internet is a limited market, albeit an incomprehensibly large one), there’s a slowdown, and then there’s a complete about face. That’s where things are currently standing with the Baby Boomer generation.
Whilst this demographic is an underwhelmingly small number of Facebook users, they are also the most susceptible to advertising online, with some tests showing they’re nearly three times as likely to follow through with a purchase online, without bothering to do further research.
If you’ve been mining this particular rich silver seam, it may be time to look elsewhere. Hopefully what you learnt in Facebook’s ad platform will help you with your targetting in a search engine’s.
Personally, I recommend Yahoo. Anyone that still thinks they have the best search results is bound to be the sort of person that doesn’t bother looking for alternatives
A lot of you guys are asking questions about how you can get your sites to rank higher than other sites for the same keywords. Well, part of this is difficult, because you’re really all standing on each other’s toes. If we gave you actual keywords to rank for, you’d all use them, and simply be competing with each other. Then no one wins, because you’re all fighting with each other for online turf instead of actually making sales.
So the next best thing we can give you is advice on hwo to research and rank for keywords effectively.
For a start, keyword stuffing no longer works. So don’t do it. If you’ve got a bajillion little words at the bottom of the page, in size 1 font, in the same colour as the background of the page, the major search engine’s spiders can actually read that code, and will slap you for it. It’s not a major major slap, you’re not going to get entirely deranked or sandboxed, but you will lose standing. So just don’t do it.
This goes for natural keyword stuffing too. Don’t attempt to talk about “fantastic blue widgets”, or whatever you’re talking about, over and over again. There is no magic percentage of text, that having the keywords meet precisely, will boost your rankings for. The major search engines are semanticly driven now. They can basically infer what your post/site is about from the similarity of words and concepts to each other. Therefore, instead of constantly repeating “fantastic blue widgets”, grab your thesaurus, and throw in some synonymous words and phrases, like “awesome teal doodads”. So long as it has the same meaning, it will work in your favour.
Now, Meta Tag keywords. Don’t stuff those either. It’s really, really pointless. If you have a couple of long tails you’re attempting to rank for, they’re still useful. However, the meta tag are no longer counted for SERP in the algorithms in the same way they used to be. As I mentioned, the SEs are semantic now. If your description says one thing, and your keyword tags say it in fewer words, and then your body/copy text actually talks about that stuff, then that’s great. It will be seen as a positive correlation and not effect the score. If it doesn’t match though, negative correlation will work against you.
Why pay good money for someone’s product htat probably pulls its results from here anyway?
Finally, if you are pushing traffic via PPC, use the above tool and find out what keywords Google thinks your site is ranking for, regardless of what you’re attempting to. Going for those keywords will generally get you a lower CPC for your ads, thanks to a higher quality score… Generally.
As I mentioned in another post, Yahoo! Answers is a prime example of how people will do “research”.
When I say it with those little quote marks, I mean that they do a really half-baked job which will most likely give them nothing but misinformation and generally the wrong idea, or because they have an inkling of the right idea, suddenly they’re an expert. The best part is, it doesn’t matter where these answers are coming from, people who aren’t smart enough to figure out how to do primary research on their own (hint: It’s called Google) generally don’t question the authority of the person providing them with answers.
This is the territory that Yahoo! Answers sits in.
People who can’t be bothered doing research asking other people to do it for them, and then not really bothering to question or verify the information. They’re the kinds of people Let Me Google That For You was invented for… But why is this so important to you?
These people really need our help
Whilst you’re technically not allowed to use Y!A for personal gain, there’s nothing stopping you from passing on useful information. If people are asking where to download their favourite album, how to get Wii games, why their Windows Media Player or iPod won’t play .torrent files, you can leap in and give them sterling advice by directing them towards your blog, or landing page, or even just a URL that you can use to mask your PID.
See that picture to the right? There are over 6,700 similar questions at the time of writing this post. There’s an average of about three posted every day. If you spend a few minutes each day using Y!A’s advanced search, you can home in and find questions that have none, or very few, answers to them. Becoming the first source of information in itself is pretty valuable when dealing with people like this.
Perhaps the best part about using the Y!A service is the bizarre fact that Yahoo (obviously) and Google give it such a high position in the SERPs, thanks to their algorithms, regardless of the validity or worth of the actual information presented. So not only will your answer be there for the person that asked it, it will remain and be displayed for people that are smart enough to attempt to do some research under their own steam.
After all, our programs aren’t selling downloads. Our programs are selling memberships to a site that gives users a bundle of freeware programs to enjoy media in a wide range of formats, the ability to transfer between formats, as well as general, customised help… And if you happen to profit by it, well, it’s not like Yahoo isn’t profiting off the advertising they serve up every time someone goes back to check their answers.
Lastly, we’ll leave you with a bit of entertainment. It is perhaps the dumbest question and answer ever found on Y!A, and someone out there has been thoughtful enough to provide an animation for our amusement.
One of the most interesting things about psychology is precisely how little research it takes for most people to feel like they’ve researched a subject enough on it to be an intermediate, if not expert, source of knowledge on the matter. You know the types. People that read a 4 inch column in the news, a couple of Op/Ed letters and a few blogs, and suddenly they’re an expert on the fiscal policy in Liberia as it pertains to US oil interests in the former Soviet region.
Yahoo! Answers is the perfect example of this, actually.
The point of this is that you can basically make a customer feel they’ve done all the comparative research they need to on any given product, by making a review site. The average consumer not going to go and look at another view site and compare. They’re going to compare similar products on the one review site, and see which product is the best.
“Awesome, a review site! Let’s read things… BAM! Research done. Let’s buy a shamWOW over a KleeneeZ or that SkweeGee.”
You can capitalise on this by having a review site of your own, and plugging multiple Affiliation Cash offers on the one site.
“Hmm, should I buy Limeshare? Oh, I’ve heard good things about Piratebay. This Latest Downloads site looks good, too.”
It doesn’t matter which one of those that the browser ends up buying, because you’ve still made a sale!
And because they’ve done their “research”, they feel confident knowing they’ve got the best value deal.
News for those of you pushing your programs with pay-per-click ads: Yahoo is offering new targeting options.
Specifically on offer is the much needed Geo-targeting right down to a Zip code level, Ad Scheduling so you can finally day part your campaign for a better CTR without having to use a Greasemonkey script, and Demographic Targeting, although they haven’t exactly explained how that works, my Y! account hasn’t caught up with the changes yet. Supposedly, the demographic targeting will allow you to go for age-and-gender cross sections on both the Content Network and and sponsored search listings.
Whilst this really is a case of them finally catching up with the rest of the search advertising market, it does offer something unique: The Yahoo users themselves.
Admittedly there is substantially less traffic than on Google, but what traffic there is tends to convert at a much higher ratio. At AC, we figure this is because the people still on Yahoo tend to be older users that started using the net in the early 90s, and haven’t been able to keep up with changing technologies.
What all this should hopefully ad up to is more targeted ads, meaning a higher CTR, which in turn should help lower the cost of your CPC, as well as getting the right people clicking the first place.
When I say it with those little quote marks, I mean that they do a really half-baked job which will most likely give them nothing but misinformation and generally the wrong idea, or because they have an inkling of the right idea, suddenly they’re an expert. The best part is, it doesn’t matter where these answers are coming from, people who aren’t smart enough to figure out how to do primary research on their own (hint: It’s called Google) generally don’t question the authority of the person providing them with answers.